Nicholas Carr's blog

The enigma of the robot-batted shuttlecock

From “Robots Must Do More Than Just Playing Sports,” an article in today’s China Daily:

Premier Li Keqiang visited a town in Chengdu, capital of Southwest China’s Sichuan province, on Monday, during which he played badminton with a robot.

Yang Feng, an associate professor on automation from Northwestern Polytechnical University, commented: “In order to play badminton, a droid needs high-accuracy vision and image processing, as well as precise motion control. It has to recognize the shuttlecock in flight and calculate its trajectory and then anticipate where it can hit the shuttlecock.”

Did you know that the word “shuttlecock” was coined 500 years ago? It’s a hell of a sturdy word, and one that I try to use in conversation every day.

The anonymous journalist who wrote the China Daily story was grudging in his praise of the badminton-playing robot:

Early in 2011, Zhejiang University developed Wu and Kong, two special sporting droids, which could play table tennis with each other and with human players. In that sport, the robots need to recognize the ball more precisely than in playing badminton. Instead of a technological breakthrough, the droid that plays badminton in Chengdu can be better called a good, practical model that uses these technologies.

“A good, practical model”? For what, exactly?

The headline “Robots Must Do More Than Just Playing Sports,” while wonderful, is mysterious. The article, as Eamonn Fitzgerald observes, “contains nothing to support the demand asserted in the headline.”

I find a clue to the mystery in a new piece on the ongoing productivity paradox, this one appearing in today’s Times. Despite all the excitement about how super-efficient robots and software are displacing lazy humans from jobs, labor productivity remains in the doldrums:

The number of hours Americans worked rose 1.9 percent in the year ended in March. New data released Thursday showed that gross domestic product in the first quarter was up 1.9 percent over the previous year. Despite constant advances in software, equipment and management practices to try to make corporate America more efficient, actual economic output is merely moving in lock step with the number of hours people put in, rather than rising as it has throughout modern history.

We could chalk that up to a statistical blip if it were a single year; productivity data are notoriously volatile. But this has been going on for some time.

If computers are going to take over jobs on a massive scale, then labor productivity — output per human worker — is going to go way up. Way, way up. But, despite years of heavy investment in automation and years of rapid advances in information technology, we have seen no sign of that happening. Productivity is moribund. Productivity measures are notoriously fuzzy, and some economists speculate that computer-inspired productivity gains are not being captured by traditional economic measures. There’s something to that idea but, at least when it comes to the labor market, probably not all that much. The mismeasurement hypothesis has been debunked, or at least tempered, by studies like this one and this one. If computers and robots are taking over the labor market, we’re going to see it in the labor productivity statistics. And we’re not. Computers are changing jobs in deep ways, but they’re not rendering the human worker obsolete — and in some cases, as we’ve seen in the past, software may actually dampen productivity by distracting workers or encouraging them to spend more time on trivial tasks.

What we may be seeing is what I’ll term the Shuttlecock Paradox. Robots are capable of doing amazing things — playing badminton with the premier, for instance — but the amazingness is often thin and brittle. Robots may soon be able to beat the best badminton players in the world, but that’s not going to put professional badminton players out of work. Because it’s still a lot more fun to watch people play badminton than to watch robots play badminton. Remember how automatic teller machines were going to put bank tellers out of work? And yet, even though ATMs are everywhere, there are more bank tellers at work today than when ATMs were invented.

What we may be mismeasuring is the gap between robot performance and human performance — and the fact that a whole lot of jobs, old ones and new ones, good ones and drab ones, may fit in that gap. “Robots Must Do More Than Just Playing Sports”: It’s a gnomic headline, to be sure, but I sense profundities in it.